After seeing this booklet criticized severely on Goodreads for a
month, it dawned on me there was one key issue I didn't make clear
enough:

Goodreads IS NOT your
neighborhood Book Club.

Goodreads
is a FOR-PROFIT business. It makes money by listing my books without
my permission and letting Goodreads members rate them without
reading them and providing that rating data to Amazon and god knows
who else.

Goodreads
is neither a non-profit nor a charity. I am not donating to them. It
is not my local library and it is not the Library of Congress, both
of which have been used to tell me why I have no right to remove my
books from their commercial database. BULLSHIT! All of the ratings
and reviews have commercial value to Amazon who owns Goodreads lock,
stock and barrel. Otherwise, why would they have ever bought it from
Otis Chandler for so many millions of dollars? Members of Goodreads
are fools to provide this lucrative subsidiary of Amazon with untold
thousands of hours of free labor trying to maintain the unmanageable
mess their much hyped billion+
book database is in. Considering how many ghost books and ghost members are in their
database, I wonder what an audit of their claims about books and
membership would show.

This site is primarily intended to assist Independent authors,
known as an Indie author in the publishing trade, especially new
ones, navigate the dangerous shoals of Goodreads. It might provide
an established author with something to think about, but I would
imagine most published authors, those with both paper and / or
electronic publications, have agents and legal advice to help them
deal with Goodreads and Amazon. All authors should realize their
relationship with Goodreads is adversarial.

Since it's so easy to publish in the modern electronic realm using
freely available computer applications, Indie Authors are
proliferating at an exponential rate. Once they've finished their
masterpiece and uploaded it to Amazon or Smashwords or AllRomance or
whomever, they face the daunting task of marketing. There are a
number of venues: Facebook, Twitter, Amazon forums, Goodreads and
other reader oriented sites. Trying to figure out which to use, or
which combination to use, eats up a large amount of time that most
authors would rather devote to writing, so they pay little attention
to signing up with these sites.

Every published author should understand their work(s) will end up
in the Goodreads database whether they want them there or not. Once
in the database, Goodreads members can 'review'
them along with a rating, or without, or rate them without a review;
there is no requirement to
touch the book. Once your title is made available at an outlet like
Amazon, Smashwords, iTunes, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, etc.,
Goodreads will find it and add it to their database within two
weeks. It took 12 days for their system to locate my book, Authors
vs. Goodreads, at Smashwords after I released it. They have the
right to catalog the title of your work and the author name.
However, they will also display your cover, which they do not have
the right to display, unless your title is on Amazon (it's in the
Amazon TOS), and they will create a Book Description page using
whatever you wrote as the book description at the outlet where they
found it. They will make no attempt to contact you. It appears that
your title will be on Goodreads within two days after you upload it
to Amazon, longer if your book is only at other outlets.

Note to Goodreads members that are
not authors, since this seems to confuse you: The reason
you didn't find this booklet on Amazon is because the Amazon KDP
system does not allow an author to upload a free book. There is no
profit in it for Amazon. Besides, I wouldn't put my books on Amazon
anyway. At least I have a choice
there.

Now, here's the odd thing. If your name is the same as another
author at Goodreads, they may catalog your book with the book(s) by
the other author. I know this happened to new SMUT Indie author
Brian Cox sometime in late 2014 when he published his first title at
Amazon: The Perfect Lover. There are a
number of authors with the name Brian Cox on Goodreads, some with
author pages, some without. But for some unfathomable reason they
chose to place Mr. Cox's erotica on the book list of Brian
Cox, particle physicist and university professor who is
apparently rather famous in England. He has a gargantuan following
on Twitter. He is author or co-author of more than a dozen
scientific books, has appeared on radio and TV in the United Kingdom
and is a musician. So, out of all of the authors on Goodreads with
the name Brian Cox, they chose this particular Brian Cox to add an
erotica genre book onto his list? Why didn't they put it on a new
author page? If I was a betting person, I'd say there's some payback
going on. It's obvious Brian Cox,
physicist, doesn't monitor his Goodreads page. I wonder if he
even knows he has one? He has no Goodreads 'friends'
and you can't contact him through Goodreads. All you can do is
become a fan. My guess is his publisher put up the page without
telling him and barely maintains it.

Note: The problem outlined
above with two Brian Cox authors was finally fixed on or about
01/26/2015. Of course, since then I've found an author with three
active profiles, two of which he didn't know he had. This is the
kind of data integrity you get when a bunch of volunteers are
maintaining your database of 1 billion+ books. While my critics on
Goodreads point out that all of the problems I have outlined do
occur, they tell me I should expect them. I would answer: I might
expect them on an all volunteer book club database, but I shouldn't
have to expect them on a for-profit website owned by Amazon which is
making money listing my titles.

For established authors who have publishers or publicists,
Goodreads can be a nightmare. Your publisher might establish an
author's page for you and load your titles or claim your titles
after Goodreads has already loaded them in one of their sweeps. In
order to establish a buzz about a book they may make 'friends'
and join groups and talk up your books or use Goodreads ad features.
They will make it seem like you are an active member. In other cases
they might massage your books when they are new, then let your page
languish as it appears Brian Cox's publisher did, allowing other
books by another author named Brian Cox to populate his book list as
discussed above. In any event, it is the author who will look like a
fool when things go wrong on the author page or their books get
carpet bombed with 1* ratings.

The most nightmarish scenario is when a publicist goes rogue and
works Goodreads' fatally flawed 'review' system to try to
hype an author's book to the detriment of similar works in the genre
by other authors. Here is one that went horribly awry back in
2013. In particular, please read message #4 by the author of the
book that hired the sleazy publicist. Jay Daniels had no idea what
Goodreads was and did not create an author's page on the website.
He's so upset that all he wants is to remove his book and shut down
the author page. Ironically, he doesn't know that he can't remove
his book. After Goodreads manually cleans up the mess, his book will
still be, and still is, on Goodreads. The part I can't fathom is
that NOT ONE author or member placed blame for the debacle
where it was due, on Goodreads flawed 'rating/review' system
that invites this abuse. The attitude of Goodreads is truly mind
boggling. Authors need to read message #10 by Librarian Christopher
carefully. He outlines the affect it might have on innocent authors
and places responsibility to fix the problem Goodreads created on
the victim's shoulders: "I'm sorry if you didn't know anything about
it, but it's time to correct it as quickly as possible." And not one
of the potentially affected authors questioned why Goodreads allows
such a flawed rating system to continue.

Unbelievable: On 22 January 2015, Goodreads removed the
incriminating page. But it is still available here: web.archive.org.

Nothing has changed. The same abuse can happen again today. And
what if this time the abuse comes from a religious fundamentalist or
political wingnut group who decides that a symbolic book burning is
in order. (See the Vulnerability
section.)

Last time I checked
(12/2014) Goodreads was owned by Amazon. That alone should
give you pause when considering giving any information to Goodreads.
You are feeding Amazon's insatiable quest for book information and
domination as a book seller. Oddly, there is no reference on the
Goodreads website to this business relationship that I can find.

If you are still determined to join Goodreads as an author, please
do an Internet search for information about goodreads
reviewer bullying and goodreads
reviewer trolling. One site all of these searches will find is
STGRB.
As an author joining Goodreads, you should be familiar with this
site. Before you sign up, or if you have just signed up, please read
Thinking of joining Goodreads
and Author guidelines
at a minimum. Always keep in mind, you may need to know some of this
information if you come under attack by the review trolls on
Goodreads. They run in packs and they are as vicious as any wolf
pack.

Examine your motives for joining Goodreads carefully:

Valid reasons for an author to join Goodreads:

I want to network with other authors
who write in my genre or write in a genre I'm thinking about
trying.

I'll meet authors who can give me
their perspective on finding a publisher.

I'll meet authors who use
publication outlets other than Amazon and learn how to use them.

Other authors can provide leads on
editing services and beta readers.

Other authors can give me hints on
what marketing techniques work for them.

Other authors can advise me about
dealing with Goodreads trolls and review bullies.

Poor reasons for an author to join Goodreads:

I think their'Review' system will
help market my book.

I think it is a good venue to
advertise my book.

Goodreads Launch
Packages are guaranteed to create buzz for my new book.

The Goodreads Get
A Copy links will make it seamless for users to find
outlets that carry my books.

Perhaps this blog by a Goodreads
author will give you some pause for thought. Let Duncan Ralston
enlighten you on what you can expect when dealing with Goodreads.
Remember, you will be paying to keep the lights on at Goodreads, not
the readers. They are exploited in their own right by giving free
review rating data to Amazon and providing copious hours of
voluntary time being Librarians, thus saving Goodreads from needing
a large staff for their unmanageable database.

The corporate structure of Goodreads appears to be lean
and mean. Probably should be since Goodreads is little more
than a giant server farm. All they need is some IT personnel, a few
marketing folks and a few faceless office personnel to handle the
email and act as the final arbiters of disputes. I can tell you from
experience they are understaffed in the IT department because there
are many features on the Goodreads website that are broken and their
response to reported feature problems is glacial. What's ironic is
that sometimes features are fixed, then changed and broken again.
Other problems never get addressed and their documentation is
abominable which leads to problems for authors that I will address
below. Rather odd considering Goodreads is an Amazon company and
Amazon's computer infrastructure is renowned.

All members at Goodreads are equal, but some are More
Equal. (Apologies to George Orwell.) Goodreads is primarily
a site for readers to flock together and network with one another
and talk books. Goodreads emphasizes it is a service for readers and
puts their needs first. Authors should always keep this foremost in
their minds, the readers come first.

So, how does Goodreads make money to pay for the server farm and
why would Amazon want it? Two reasons. Obviously, Amazon wants to
data mine it; find out what books are hot. Second, Goodreads needs
authors to sign up and give them free information about their books
that Amazon couldn't otherwise capture, and sell them on the notion
that Goodreads is a great place to advertise and market their books.
It's the ads they sell that pays for the electricity to feed the
ever growing server farm. Funny thing is, a lot of the ads obscure
other things on your member page and don't always appear where they
should. All rather haphazard. If I paid for an ad that obscured
other information on a user page, I wouldn't be happy. It looks so
unprofessional.

In fact, here
is a quote from Otis Chandler, founder of Goodreads which
distills the bottom line objective: "We
sell book launch packages to authors and publishers and really
help accelerate, build that early buzz that a book needs to
succeed when it launches and accelerate that growth through ads on
the site."

Rather straight forward profit motive. What's shocking though is
that it's so author centric and not the reader centric public
persona of the site. Obviously, they need authors to pay for the ads
and launch packages and throw free promotions for readers. Probably
why they have a Director of Author Marketing, Patrick
Brown. However, the truth of the matter is, authors
are at the very bottom of the food chain and are treated with
contempt, merely a necessary nuisance. There is even open hostility
from many readers who would prefer if there were no authors on
Goodreads. Some groups are openly hostile to authors, saying up
front they would prefer authors not join their group because the
group is for readers only.
As if authors weren't readers too.

This is an example of one author's perspective of marketing gone
awry at Goodreads and how authors are treated: an interesting
blog. As I did research for this booklet from inside Goodreads
author groups and from Internet searches, the story of marketing
boomerangs was repeated time and again.

Since Goodreads has a lean corporate structure, who does all the
trench work to run the forums and groups? Volunteers of course. And
there is one particular volunteer above all other volunteers that
wields enormous power on the website, the Librarian. As an author,
you need to understand the power of the Librarian.

The hierarchy at Goodreads is as follows: above all is the
Librarian, queen bees in the hive. Under no circumstances ever
challenge a Librarian. Never!
They maintain absolute, dictatorial control over each of your Book
Description pages, once you have submitted them and a direct line to
the Goodreads gestapos in the front office. I'll discuss how that
affects you as an author in the next section dealing with your
author information.

Next in the membership hierarchy are their readers, the worker bees
in the hive. They are pampered because they are the engine that
keeps Goodreads alive by writing reviews or merely rating a book. It
is their review information Amazon wants to collect in order to find
out what books are hot and why. They are given authority to write
reviews that are not reviews and abuse authors in almost any manner
they see fit. You are never to question their reviews, or
non-reviews that appear to be reviews, or the laughable, useless
ratings they may deign to put on your book. I will go into detail
about how utterly flawed the 'Review'
system is and how worthless the non-review reviews are, even though
Goodreads contends their reviews are "... the
best and most authentic in the world."

At the bottom of the food chain are authors, most of whom are
beneath contempt. They are only to be tolerated in the hopes they
will surrender copious amounts of information about themselves and
their books, perhaps even a heads up about a new book, along with
purchasing a launch package. They will also be urged to shower
copious amounts of fundage on Goodreads for advertisements, and
participate in other promotional adventures, especially ones that
will give their books away free making it easier for Amazon trolls
to pounce on.

As someone pointed out in a blog discussing Goodreads, "The asylum
is being run by the inmates." An apt description. It should make
authors very wary about joining.

As an author, it's imperative you understand what you are handing
over to Goodreads when you create an Author
Profile and load your book information on Goodreads. When
loading your profile, give Goodreads and Goodreads' trolls the
minimum amount of information possible. Remember, Goodreads allows
readers to make their profile private, so you are not on an even
footing from the get-go. This fact alone should raise your
suspicion. If a reader is allowed to exclude their information from
you, you best make as little information about yourself available to
them because author profiles are always public. If you get thrown
off Goodreads for standing up for yourself, your profile information
will still be public and still be owned by Goodreads. In reality,
the only part of your personal information that Goodreads has a
legal right to know is the title of your book and your author name
for that book. Think carefully about what they deserve to know about
you. It is surprising how many readers only give their name and
country or make their profile private. That should cause you to
carefully consider what information about yourself you provide to
Goodreads. Less is better.

When you load book information into the Goodreads Book Description
database, you grant control over the content of that information to
the Goodreads Librarians. Look carefully at the form, especially the
Book Description portion. All information on that form, once filled
in, belongs to Goodreads and is controlled by Goodreads' Librarians,
not you. Once you enter information, it cannot be changed without
Librarian approval. You may believe that information about your book
is yours, but it's not. If you end up on the wrong side of a
Librarian, they will make it hell for you to modify information on
the Book Description page, especially if you try to minimize it.

In your exuberance to get your books live on Goodreads so you can
gather reader reviews to illustrate how awesome your book is,
perhaps you read the Guidelines For Authors.
Not a lot of substance in there, is there? Since you are not a
Librarian, and may not even know what one is when you sign up, I
doubt you will have read the Librarian
Manual. Perhaps you really should though. You're probably
asking yourself, what is a
Librarian and why should I read their manual, since I'm not
a Goodreads Librarian? The simple fact is, you can't be a Librarian
until you publish at least 50 reviews of your own and apply and get
accepted by the Librarian guild. Most Librarians that I was aware of
were not authors, so I wondered why they were given authority over
author data in the Book Description pages. Would have thought that
was a Goodreads staff function. Except there is almost no Goodreads
staff. And this is the reasoning they give for having Librarians: "So we created a new status that we
bestow on those interested in helping keep things nice and tidy,
which has worked out well." Unfortunately, I would argue
that it is unethical to give power to readers over what is in an
authors Book Description pages, when those readers can review
authors and call on their trolls to harass an author that gets
uppity with them.

In any event, you should be mindful of what is in the Librarian
Manual, because obscure rules in that document can be used to get
you banned from Goodreads. If you do venture into it, you will learn
it is a minefield of obsolete information and broken links. (At
least as of 12/2014. I assume Goodreads will rectify that situation
as soon as possible now that I have brought it to their attention,
since they used it to ban me. Note:
01/10/2015, they fixed the links. However, they did not fix the
incorrect information about the Book Description page fields.)

And if you truly want to scare the bejesus out of yourself, read
the Goodreads Terms Of Use. You might
want to let your legal council look at it. As near as I can tell,
you essentially mortgage your soul and your firstborn to Goodreads
when you agree to it.

You're a successful new author who has signed a book deal with a
publisher. You've never joined Goodreads, perhaps never heard of
them. Would you be surprised to learn that you are a member on
Goodreads with an author's page, more than 30 Goodreads friends and
your books have been loaded with covers, for which you own the
copyright, and members have reviewed your books and rated them.

You might want to check your contract with your publisher very
closely. I don't know how often this happens but I am aware of an
author who has three books published who had no idea they were a
member of Goodreads, had an author's page and friends. It appears
their publisher, who they have since parted ways with, set up the
author page, loaded their books, added Book Description pages and
even accepted 'friend' requests in the author's name without
informing them.

As an author, you should know that you cannot prevent Goodreads
from cataloging your books in their database and letting their
members review and rate them without your knowledge. However, they
have no right to display your cover and they may only publish the
title of the book and the author's name. After your new book has
been published for a couple of months, you might want to check
Goodreads and see if it is in their database and what their members
are saying about it. I'm waiting to see how long it takes Goodreads
to find the booklet I
published on Smashwords when this website went live. I'll keep you
posted on the length of time it takes.

Bingo: It took 12 days,
December 28 to January 9. Oddly, even though I'm an excommunicated
member, I was able to claim the author page without question or
challenge, only to have it terminated 7 days later when a carpet
bomb 1* troll attack started. Coincidence?

If you do decide to join Goodreads in order to control your Author
page and control what is put on the Book Description page, I urge
you to heed the advice on this website. Give Goodreads as little
information as possible. It is best to just reference your own
website, Facebook page or other social media that you have complete
control over. At least you will control the book description in the
future and you can publish the proper links to where your books are
available if it is other than Amazon. Readers will probably have
trouble finding your books on alternate publishers because they
probably don't understand how the 'Get a copy' buttons work. They
are only there to make it easy to find your book on Amazon and even
that doesn't work sometimes.

The Goodreads review system is the most flawed book review system
on the planet. It is nothing more than a beauty pageant that invites
abuse. It you're joining Goodreads in the hopes that a bunch of good
reviews and a high review average will help market you're works, don't
join. What is truly amazing and breathtakingly
hypocritical are the Goodreads Review
Guidelines that begin:

"Goodreads has some of the best book
reviews anywhere. Our members are passionate, knowledgeable readers,
and their contributions to the site are what make it such a vibrant
and fun place. These guidelines are presented to help make sure
Goodreads? reviews remain the best and most authentic in the world."

Such bombast is rare anymore, especially considering it's a lie.
You would think Goodreads would be embarrassed making such
statements for what is so obviously a fatally flawed review system
with no rigor whatsoever. There may be some great reviews on
Goodreads but when there is no requirement in the Review Guidelines
that the reviewer read the book, all reviews are suspect. In
addition, having a rating system that allows people to 'rate'
books, without a review, for instance, books that are merely put on
their, "wouldnt-pee-on-it-if-it-was-on-fire,"
shelf with a rating of 1* and that counts as a 'review,'
is idiotic.

Goodreads book review system is unlike any other I'm aware of. It
isn't even as rigorous as Amazon's. Don't understand why that is,
since Goodreads is owned by Amazon. It combines a completely
worthless 'rating' system
with a dubious review system that allows reviews that aren't
reviews, because there's no requirement to read a book in order to
write a review of it. I call them 'non-review
reviews.' I know of no other outlet for books that allows a
person to provide only a 'rating'
that's counted in the book's review average. And that rating can be
set for just placing a book on a shelf, especially a derisive shelf.

Lets face it, the rating only system is a beauty pageant; it
certainly isn't a review because there's no requirement for the
rater to read the book. What's shocking is that some members use the
rating system to catalog books on their shelves, using 1* to
indicate some meaning to them, usually that that book is more
important on their 'to-read'
shelf than a book on a shelf with no rating.

If the overall review average is to have any validity, the rating
only system needs to be abolished, or at least, the ratings should
not contribute to the overall average. You're probably asking
yourself, why would Goodreads have a rating only system along with a
review system? Because many readers don't like to express themselves
in public and don't want to waste time writing reviews. But Amazon
wants as much free feedback data as it can gather in order to know
what books are hot. While that may be a valid reason at Netflix,
where a person might put some stock in the popularity of a movie
with 4*, it is meaningless in a rigorous book review system. These
rating only entries look rather innocuous. They are not in the Review portion of the book
page. They are at the bottom where all of the members that 'added
it' or 'marked it as
to-read' are clustered together like a mosh pit of fans.

The other major flaw is the non-review
review. Once a member puts a rating on a book, even if they
haven't touched it, they are asked to write a review. If a member
writes anything, it is taken as a review and appears with all other
reviews above the mosh pit of shelvers. Nowhere in the review does
there need to be an indication that the member read the book. The
reviewer may or may not give the review a rating. Sometimes
reviewers don't make a rating, they just want to make a statement
about the book, almost 100% of the time a negative or derogatory
statement with a cutesy full motion .gif. There is also an ego
stroking addition for the reviewer that doesn't show up on a rating
only. It is the like
button. All of your friends can stroke your ego by pressing the like button. The other
advantage for a full fledged non-review
review is the Comment
section where you and your friends can gossip about your outstanding
review.

Since the review has now become a work of authorship and you can
now 'rate' it positively
using the like button, I
wonder why others can't rate it negatively. Clearly the like
button is only there to stroke the ego of the reviewer. Without a
matching dislike button,
it should be abolished since the whole review system is a farcical
beauty pageant. Strangely enough, the like
button does provide one bit of embarrassing feedback for the
reviewer. When there is a troll attack, most of the attackers like one or more of the
critical non-review reviews.
The troll attack becomes so blatantly obvious when a bunch of the 'Likers' 1* rate a book all on
the same day or day after the non-review review. It's so glaringly
obvious that you would think Goodreads would take some action to
stop this nonsense.

New Indie authors should be aware that there are quite a number of
readers on Goodreads who will not read any book by an Indie author.
I was a bit surprised by this narrow minded attitude when I joined
several groups. But some readers are quite adamant and vocal about
it. Don't be surprised if you get some barbs thrown your way in some
groups, especially those that discuss writing style or editing.

One final thought about reviews and reviewers. Writing reviews has
become a professional extreme sport on Goodreads. It will begin to
dawn on you that there are semi-professional reviewers and their are
review contests to heap recognition on them. You might even notice
on some reader profiles a tally of the number of books read and
reviews given. It normally appears in a manner something like this
under the avatar picture:

896 ratings (3.37 average)
721 reviews
Goodreads librarian

#4 top users
#2 top readers
#1 top librarians
#1 top reviewers
#1 best reviewers
#3 most followed

From all this puffery in tiny print below the avatar picture, the
untrained eye or newbie author might believe this member is a damned
important person on Goodreads. Turns out, looks are deceiving
because all those statistics below the number of reviews are not for
all of Goodreads. They are for a region or a country. And if it is
for a very tiny country, it doesn't take much to be the #1 reviewer
and best reviewer in your country. Especially a country where the
majority of the population can ill afford books, computer equipment
and eReaders in order to be a member of Goodreads. Moral of the
story, forget the self important puffery of readers. It's much ado
about nothing, except perhaps for the fact this reader is a
Librarian.

However, all these battle ribbons do indicate something that might
not be readily apparent to the casual observer. In order to be able
to pound your chest about how important a member you are, you have
to write a lot of reviews. Notice the 3.37 average. If you click on
it, it will show you a bar graph of how this 'Very
Important Member' performs as a reviewer. Statistically
speaking, the bars probably resemble a bell curve shape. Those
reviewers that have too many 5* ratings or too many 1* ratings in
proportion to the 2-4* ratings are probably going to be viewed with
suspicion. But, not to worry it's very easy to skew the ratings.
Let's say you need a few more 1* ratings to keep the curve looking
authentic. Find some insignificant Indie author nobody has ever
heard of, in a niche genre few read. Select one of their free short
stories and shred it with invective, including derogatory,
meaningless .gifs making the review almost as long as the story
itself. Your job is done and it's doubtful anyone will ever notice
the review out of the more than 700 you've done, especially
considering nobody reads this author and the fool hasn't sold a book
in months.

Review bullying, and rating attacks by bands of trolls is a
nationally famous pastime at Goodreads. There are many stories about
these subjects on the Internet. Google goodreads review bullying
("About 324,000 results (0.23 seconds)") or goodreads troll attacks
(About 1,850,000 results (0.32 seconds)). Goodreads structure of
their review system
invites the documented abuse. Here's how it works:

Pick a book, perhaps the most reviewed book of an unknown author
nobody has every heard of in a niche genre nobody cares about. This
will work just as well on a major author's new book that doesn't
have many reviews yet, because it will have an obvious affect on
their average rating and make it appear the new book is a critical
dud. If it's on an already acclaimed book with thousands of reviews,
the troll attack won't work well because it won't make a statistical
dent in the rating average.

In this case, the book had been out less than a year. It received
11 written reviews from 3* to 5* and 12 ratings from 1* to 5* spread
out fairly evenly during the year. The last review appeared on 13
October 2014 and the last rating appeared on 02 November 2014. There
was not one single 'Like'
in any of the 11 reviews.

On 19 December 2014 the first non-review review with no rating but
with a disparaging dancing .gif appeared with 11 'Likes'.
The next day, 20 December 2014, four reviews appeared, two with no
ratings and no written reviews. Of the four reviews, all included
demeaning dancing .gifs, and two had 1* ratings, one with a written
review and one with a 1 line non-review. Altogether, the reviews
shared 73 'Likes' among
them. Of the six reviews on the 20th, everyone of them were in the 'Likes' of the other reviews. It
was a clearly coordinated attack and they weren't subtle about it.

If anyone, especially authors and those readers who take reviews
seriously, wants to fix the deeply flawed "review"
system at Goodreads, I suggest we adopt the system used by the
marauding troll packs that the website is nationally famous for.

When an author is carpet bombed with 1* ratings and reviews that
aren't reviews, PM me.

I will buy your book and leave a glowing 5* review of your book.
At least my review will have a semblance of being legitimate because
I will have at least opened your book and read your Table Of
Contents, although that isn't necessary according the the Goodreads
Review Guidelines. Then we will let interested Goodreads members
know that you're being trolled. Perhaps, we would start with all of
your Goodreads friends. Or perhaps we could develop a list of people
who would like the abuse to stop, possibly from some of the author's
forums. If they're interested in fighting the troll attack, they can
'Like' my review and add
your book to their "Love To Read
This Obviously Excellent Book" shelf with a 5* rating.

Or, you always have the option to "review" your own book, which I
always thought was kind of goofy. Until I was trolled. Give yourself
a 5* rating and PM me. I will 'like'
your review and add your book to my 'Love
To Read This Obviously Excellent Book' shelf with a 5*
rating. Saves me buying your book. If you want increased sales
though, do it my way.

Maybe if this happened a few times, Goodreads would get the hint
that their vaunted 'Review'
system is an utter farce that invites abuse. If nothing changed,
hopefully it would go viral and the media would pick it up. That's
what happened the last time anyone got Goodreads' attention about
this problem.

While you were digesting the previous topic about one suggestion to
deal with a 'troll attack',
perhaps it crossed your mind that Goodreads has opened the lid to
Pandora's Box for an easy type of attack that could prove very
embarrassing if it received wide media publicity. Since the rating
system invites abuse and the review system allows for reviews
without the requirement of reading the book, here's an easy attack
that would be great media fodder.

Something peculiar that I noticed soon after putting up my first
book on Goodreads was the number of foreigners who put my book on
their to-read shelf and
others even started reading it. All of my stories are in the erotica
genre and they're short, a novella at most. Strangely, these
foreigners were from countries whose governments would probably
frown on smut. And strangely, nobody ever finished a book, even
after months of reading it. Most of the profiles were only name and
country and almost all of them had at least one other classic
literature book on their bookshelf or were reading
it. Something like Moby Dick. After signing up at Goodreads, there
was never any recent activity and they didn't join groups.

I'll bet I could pay twenty foreigners, from say Malaysia, to set
up 100 bogus accounts for a very small sum of money. I would tell
them to add a particular book to their "wouldn't-pee-on-it-if-it-was-on-fire"
shelf and 1* it at approximately the same time. I'd also provide a
few of them with canned 1* trash non-review
reviews with cutesy derogatory dancing .gifs to post.
Considering Goodreads' censors don't consider such an attack as
suspicious when five people do it on a single day, how would they
justify removing the attack. After all, not one of these people
violated the Review Guidelines.
Imagine what the media would do with a story like this? Especially
since Goodreads touts their reviews as "...
the best and most authentic in the world."

Wait a minute. Appears Goodreads embraces this type
of attack already because it is good for business. Pretty damn
ironic. Please iignore this section. They have no shame.

Quote
from Otis Chandler in the previous link: "I
agree that it's a shame some books have to suffer ratings that
clearly are invalid. However I can't think of a way to prevent it,
..." It appears that I came along in the nick of time,
because the next section will outline a way that Mr. Chandler can
prevent ratings that, "... clearly
are invalid."

One more thing. Mr. Chandler better pray (pun intended) that
fundamentalists of any persuasion don't figure out how flawed the
rating system on Goodreads is or there will be a whole lot of
symbolic book burnings. Think about the field day members of the
WBC, KKK or ANP will have troll rating books they disagree with.

Since I have criticized the flawed Goodreads review system, I
should probably make some suggestions that would fix it. These seem
so obvious it make me wonder why Goodreads never thought of them:

When a member creates an account,
they are lead through a number of steps to set their new account
up. The first step should present the Goodreads Review
Guidelines which would include a statement that to review a book
with a rating, the reader agrees that they have read the book.
Include an <accept> / <decline> option like all
commercial licensed software requires. If they decline, do not
create the account and terminate the session. After all,
Goodreads is a commercial software system to provide rating data
to their parent company, Amazon.

Completely abolish the rating only
system. The ratings are meaningless, except as popularity
statistics for Amazon data mining.

For any written review, add two
mutually exclusive buttons that appear with the review: Read
Book, DNF (Did
Not Finish) to affirm that the reviewer read the book
or at least attempted to. The requirement for setting a button
should be spelled out in the Review Guidelines, unequivocally.
Anyone proven to have selected Read
Book or DNF,
when they didn't read the book should have all of their reviews
removed. In many cases, especially troll attacks, it would be
easy to prove from the author's sales figures, except for those
books purchased at Amazon that are immediately returned, which
is a good reason not to market your titles through Amazon. (This
is the primary reason I no longer market my titles on Amazon.)

Get rid of the mosh pit of potential
readers. It is useless information. The only members showing up
on the review page should be 'read' or 'is currently
reading it' members.

Remove the Comments section along
with the like button from reviews. If Goodreads is going
to treat the 'Review' as a literary work worthy of its
own review, there should have been a Dislike button.
Another reason the Comments section should be abolished
is because it is only there for the people who 'like' the
review, especially considering the author dare not say anything
to a reviewer. Not sure why reviews are considered worthy of
review. They should stand by themselves. The comments appear to
be there for stroking the ego of the reviewer and posting gossip
between the reviewer and their myriad of 'friends'.

Since it is Goodreads policy to add
every newly published book to their database and thus profit
from them, they should attempt to contact authors and inform
them their book is on Goodreads. Until an author claims their
author page, Goodreads should not allow reviews or ratings. If
an author informs Goodreads they don't want their book listed,
remove it, or in the very least, do not allow reviews and
ratings. I know of numerous authors who don't want their books
on Goodreads because of the flawed rating system, and I know of
numerous books that are misfiled or commingled with other
authors.

If Goodreads were to implement these suggestions, the troll attacks
would be minimized because the 1* rating-only would no longer affect
the average. People who didn't read the book would have no impact on
the rating average and their non-review reviews would be obvious for
what they are, harassment. It would also behoove Goodreads to
investigate more than two or three 1* ratings on a given day on a
book that gets maybe one review a month as a vindictive troll
attack, especially when all of the perpetrators 'like'
each others' reviews. Goodreads should remove the troll reviews with
a warning to the perps. If they continue doing that sort of thing,
put a permanent red star on their profile, so other members know
what kind of people they are. It is useless to excommunicate them
because they just come back under another name. It is ridiculously
easy to become a Goodreads member. Getting caught should be their 'Scarlet Letter.'

Some features at Goodreads are broken, fixed and broken again, or
never fixed at all. Therefore, it should surprise no-one that
Goodreads documentation, such as the Guidelines
For Authors, Goodreads' Terms Of Use, and the Librarian Manualmight
be a bit intimidating, impenetrable or could possibly contain out of
date material. Well, surprise! Their documentation is all of that
and more.

Guideline
For Authors

A new author to Goodreads would probably start with the Guidelines For Authors if
they were interested in documentation available on the website. No
surprises in it except the Some
things to avoid on Goodreads section, and this one is key:

Don?t engage
with people who give you negative reviews.We
cannot stress this enough. The number one mistake new authors make
is to respond to negative reviews. Engaging with people who don?t
like your book is not likely to win you any new readers and could
lead to members deciding not to read your book. Remember Goodreads
is not private; other readers will see a reaction from the author
and interpret it as hostile regardless of how carefully the
response was crafted. A single negative interaction is often
enough to turn a reader off an author permanently.

Are you getting the picture that Goodreads is a rather adversarial
environment. As an author, just bend over and take whatever abuse is
heaped on you. Silently.
Because you are supposed to have a thick skin. For 1* negative
reviews, not simple ratings, there is a flag link provided to
explain to Goodreads why you think a review is abusive, offensive or
an outright lie. That link will buy you nothing, unless the reviewer
threatened you and your family with great bodily harm. There is
nothing in the Review Guidelines that
requires a reader to read your book in order to write the most
scathing review imaginable with plenty of offensive, dancing .gifs
and disparaging language. Your complaint will go into the nameless,
faceless Goodreads bureaucracy and you might get an answer in 5 days
or more, if you're lucky. As far as I know, they will always side
with the reviewer, especially if the reviewer is also a Librarian.
And here's the reason, as stated in the first paragraph of the
Guidelines:

"Our members
are passionate, knowledgeable readers, and their contributions to
the site are what make it such a vibrant and fun place."

Obviously, Goodreads wouldn't want to stifle the vibrancy or
curtail any of the fun readers relish when they write useless
reviews or go on a troll attack with their friends. And they always
do it in a pack.

If you're going to write a review, look the Guidelines over, but
don't worry about what you say, the rules are toothless. What may be
objectionable to you in a review is not necessarily objectionable to
a Goodreads staffer trying to decide to pull a review. They really
don't want to piss off a reader.

However, I had one hilarious episode with the Goodreads censors and
it's an excellent illustration of where you sit in the pecking order
and where Librarians sit. Always realize that Librarians have a
direct line to God, i.e. the Goodreads censors. When they complain
about you putting a link into a blog to illustrate a point about
review trolling, they call God and the blog is removed within 24
hours. Not only are you not allowed to criticize a review, your not
allowed to link to it to make your point, never mind that you
weren't criticizing the review itself. But when a reviewer, who
happens to be a Librarian, has a pornographic avatar picture that
you report to Goodreads through the flag button below picture, it
takes two complaints over five days to get the avatar picture
removed. What's truly mind boggling is you would think a Librarian
would know the rules about pornographic avatar pictures. Especially
when they expect you to know rules you can't even find, as the
section on the Librarian Manual, below, will illustrate.

Terms
Of Use

Goodreads' Terms Of Use is a lot of
legalese gobbledygook. I can guarantee you that everything in there
gives Goodreads an advantage over you. This section should scare the
crap out of you:

3.
License Grant

By
posting any User Content on the Service, you expressly grant, and
you represent and warrant that you have a right to grant, to
Goodreads a royalty-free, sublicensable, transferable, perpetual,
irrevocable, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use, reproduce,
modify, publish, list information regarding, edit, translate,
distribute, publicly perform, publicly display, and make derivative
works of all such User Content and your name, voice, and/or likeness
as contained in your User Content, in whole or in part, and in any
form, media or technology, whether now known or hereafter developed,
and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing for any
purpose at the sole discretion of Goodreads. If you submit works to
the Service via the ?My Writing? or ?Ebook? features, ourTerms
of Use for Writersapply to those works.

Without consulting a lawyer, and I'm not one, it appears that whatever
you put up on the Goodreads site is now their property to do with as
they wish. Certainly, if I had it to do over, I would not put any of
my books on the site. Unfortunately, it makes little difference
because they will put your books on their site, including your
copyrighted cover without your permission.

Librarian
Manual

The Librarian Manual is probably
the one manual you would overlook because, as far as you know, you're
not a Librarian. Do so at your own peril. But be forewarned, it is
badly out of date and full of broken links so you may not find the
information you need to know. As of this day: 09 January 2015 (I
include this date because Goodreads will probably clean this mess up
when they notice this website), this is the best example of why
Goodreads documentation is useless:

Click on the link to the Manual.
You will see a very long page, but scroll down to:

Note:Replacing or removing the
cover of an existing edition is in violation of Goodreads policy.
Please see information on how to add analternate
cover editionif
the book has been released with a new cover.

(This
topic has now been broken down into subtopics for ease in using and
editing.)

Even though Goodreads uses a format that doesn't readily indicate what
is a link because they have deliberately suppressed the underline that
normally indicates a link, click on upload
photo. This is the result:

Page
Not Found

The
page you requested doesn't exist. Please check the url again, or
visit the home page.

Next, click on format,
result:

Page
Not Found

The
page you requested doesn't exist. Please check the url again, or
visit the home page.

Click on edition, result:

Page
Not Found

The
page you requested doesn't exist. Please check the url again, or
visit the home page.

Click on official URL,
which it should be noted is NOT
on the Book edit page at all, result:

Page
Not Found

The
page you requested doesn't exist. Please check the url again, or
visit the home page.

Click on description,
result:

Page
Not Found

The
page you requested doesn't exist. Please check the url again, or
visit the home page.

Please note: I was
excommunicated from Goodreads on 23 December 2014 because of a rule
on the description
page which I could not see and was not informed it was on
that page until after my removal.

Click on primary language,
result:

Page
Not Found

The
page you requested doesn't exist. Please check the url again, or
visit the home page.

Click on source, result:

Page
Not Found

The
page you requested doesn't exist. Please check the url again, or
visit the home page.

Click on created, result:

Page
Not Found

The
page you requested doesn't exist. Please check the url again, or
visit the home page.

Got the picture? The link to every page was broken. This document
was useless when I was accused of breaking a rule that it contains.
I must admit, I broke a rule in this manual but I didn't know where
it was until the link to it was spelled out in the email that told
me I had been excommunicated. It was not spelled out in any of the
previous emails warning me I was in violation of some unknowable
rule. Pretty clear the Goodreads office minions didn't know the rule
either. But then again, they aren't Librarians. Since Librarian
service is laborious and tedious, Goodreads passed it off to
volunteers so they could keep their head count down.

Note: As of 10 January 2015
it appears the links have been fixed. However, a number of fields
are still in error, both in the documentation and on the 'Edit
book' form for the Book Description page. There is NO
'official URL' on the 'Edit book' form. There is no 'Primary language' field on the
form; perhaps it is 'edition
language' and there is no 'source'
field on the form. The 'characters'
field on the form takes you to your Home page? A field 'series'
is on the form, but not in the documentation and if you click on the
link, it takes you to your Home page? There is a field 'default
chapters' on the form but not in the documentation. I think
you get the picture. The documentation is still all screwed up.

Note: 17 January 2015 hold
the presses! This just in, from a 'Goodreads
Expert.' I'm not making this up. That's her title. And I
quote:

Hi
Zoe,

Thanks for your message! An official URL can be added to the
description of the book record, or under the field "official
website" in the author's page. Please let me know if your have
further questions for me.

Best, Daniela -- Daniela Gómez
Goodreads Expert
Goodreads.com

It appears I was excommunicated for breaking a rule that isn't a
rule if you are a 'Goodreads
Expert,' yet is a rule if you're a Librarian.

Much like the obsolete documentation with broken links, there are
other services and features on the website that are broken. Two of
them plagued me the entire year I was an author member on Goodreads.

One of them, few members know about and most don't know how to use.
As an author you could upload your book and offer an excerpt of the
book, or the whole book, for free download to other members. There
was also an option to read the upload in your browser. That feature
was broken, fixed, and broken numerous times, especially the part
that allowed a member to read the excerpt of the book or the entire
book in their browser, online. It's akin to the 'Look
Inside' feature on Amazon.
Never use this feature. Throughout the entire year I was a
member, this service never worked right and was fixed and changed
and broken several times. Theoretically, the author was supposed to
be able to upload and delete their works at their will. For most of
December 2014 the upload and delete button disappeared and I was
unable to get my books off of their servers. I finally had to demand
that Goodreads manually remove my books from this service, and they
eventually did. The service no longer works the way it used to and I
have no idea if it ever will again.

Never make one of your books available free to members, through
Goodreads. If you want to give away a free copy of your book, email
the requester a copy or issue a coupon at some of the outlets, like
Smashwords that has this feature. Just one more good reason not to
put your books on Amazon. They don't allow you to offer free books
unless you list with them exclusively and then it's only for short
periods.

Another service that's defective as of 12/2014 and poorly designed
in the first place is the 'Get
a copy' middle button labeled 'online
stores.' This problem affects an author's sales and I don't
know why authors aren't irate about it since it greatly affects
their presence with first time Goodreads members. I doubt any of
them understand how this button works. If your vendors don't show up
or your book doesn't show up when the member selects the vendor of
their choice, they usually give up. It finally became a serious
problem to me when one of my books got popular on Barnes &
Noble, and trying to work around it got me excommunicated from
Goodreads.

To begin with, the underlying feature is poorly implemented. It
obviously favors Amazon, since there is usually a separate button
for Amazon and the middle button is for all other vendors ... most
of the time. I've seen some books where the first button is Barnes
& Noble and Amazon is in the list of vendors on the 'online
stores' middle button. Makes no difference, the whole
vendor linking feature is poorly implemented and counter-intuitive.

For instance, I've run across books that a Goodreads author says
are on Amazon but clicking the Amazon button returns a 'book
not found' page. I won't go into the complexity of indexing
books on Amazon or any other book seller, but suffice it to say
there are many ways to identify the search index to a book. Amazon
is especially complex because they don't require an ISBN and if you
don't have one, they assign their own ASIN. Later, the author may
get an ISBN and not add it to the book upload at Amazon, yet put it
in the Book Description on Goodreads, and Goodreads will pass it as
the search index to Amazon. The result will be: 'no
book found.'

I have ISBNs for all of my books. It is the only identification
I've ever used, even when my books were at Amazon. My books always
showed up when you used the 'Get
A Copy' button for Amazon. I also publish all my stories at
Smashwords and AllRomance. One advantage at Smashwords, although
practically no reader has ever heard of them, is they push your book
to iTunes, Barnes & Noble and other vendors. So all my books are
at Barnes & Noble. Except, if you click the 'online
stores' button, then click on Barnes & Noble, if it's
even in the drop-down list, it appears that my books aren't carried
by B&N. But if you search the title, or my author name at
B&N, they are there.

There is another, more serious problem with the 'online
stores' button. It has a long list of online vendors and
Goodreads knows about hundreds of vendors, but only a few are listed
as default. If you pick one of my books, AllRomance will not show up
since it is not among the defaults. For some unfathomable reason,
each member can edit the 'online
stores' button, although I'd wager 99% of them don't know
that. This makes no sense. How is a member to know which vendors an
author uses to distribute their books? I contend the author should
have the option to insert the proper link to each of their books
behind the 'online stores'
button.

If you want readers to find your works, do
not rely on the 'Get a
copy' buttons on Goodreads. I hate to say this, but if you
have more than one book published, especially at multiple vendors,
you need a website that presents information about your books and
the proper links to each book at each of your outlets. An additional
benefit of this approach is you can upload less information about
yourself and your books on Goodreads for Amazon to mine, and you can
provide correct working links to your books. However, be very
careful where you put the link to your website. Do
not put links on the Book Description page even though
that's where they should be. There is actually a rule against
putting an Internet link with the Book Description, though I have no
idea why, and the front office gestapos don't know the rule. Only
the Librarians know the rule and if they tell the gestapo you broke
the rule and should be excommunicated, you're toast. I suspect it's
left over from when there was an 'official
URL' field on the Book Description page where you would
have put your link. But, as of 12/2014, there was no 'official
URL' field on the Book Description page. However, there is
a 'website' field on the 'Author profile' page. Quite
frankly, that's not good enough. If you have multiple books, you
want a link to point directly to each book on your website book
page, which the old 'official URL'
field could have done.

Note (01/07/2014):
Goodreads is changing the functionality of the 'online stores' button.
The drop-down list no longer appears. Clicking on the button gets
you the bizarre 'search by'
list that used to be the default drop-down list. It can be
customized by the user, although, I doubt many users know that.
After all, there are only 745 different places a user could look for
a book. How would they know which vendor the author used? This list
should be populated by the author when they place the book on
Goodreads. Uh-oh, I just 'customized'
my list to the five vendors that I know a certain book is sold
through, but when I go to the book page, only three of them show up,
although the ad shows up. Looks like a classic case of Goodreads'
crack IT team changing a feature and breaking it.

Note (01/09/2014): The
drop-down list is back. However, there is still a bug with the 'customized' feature and the ads
that are displayed when you hold down the 'online stores' button.
Keep at it Goodreads. You'll straighten it out eventually, although
it will still be useless for the following reason.

To fix the functionality of the 'Get a copy' buttons,
Goodreads should reprogram the first button to be an 'Authors
source' button. Let authors select from a list of vendors and
then let them add the correct link to their book at that vendor.
Change the name of the 'online stores' button to be 'reader
preferred source' button and leave the functionality as it is
now. Let the reader pick their favorite sources from the huge list
which Goodreads provides which includes libraries, etc.

On 22 January 2015, Goodreads deleted an embarrassing page on the
site that dated back to a trolling incident in 2013 that went
hopelessly awry. An author who claims he didn't know he was on
Goodreads was blamed for the rating fiasco. I found an archive
available here at web.archive.org.
To make damn certain it doesn't disappear again it is displayed here
in it's entirety with my notes.

Note: Travis Luedke is not the troll perpetrator. He is
exposing the incident, but at the beginning he believes the author
is the perp although that may not be the case.

Note: In message 4, below, the author has discovered the
problem and asserts that he didn't know he had a presence on
Goodreads. That, in an of itself, is not surprising. Goodreads loads
all published books into their database and representatives of
authors often claim an author's profile page without the author's
knowledge. Goodreads makes no effort to contact an author and inform
them they are on the site and will be exploited for Goodreads'
profit. Make no mistake, Goodreads is in this for the value that the
rating data represents. They are not providing a community service;
this is NOT a library or a local Book Club.

Note: Now we will get to the crux of the problem and the
astonishing arrogance of Goodreads. Read Message 10, below. It is
entirely the authors fault and he needs "... to correct it as
quickly as possible."

Yeah Andrew! Being a new Indie author that never heard of
Goodreads, you should have known better, although I have no idea how
you would have known that. In fact, if Warrior Forums is so
notorious to Goodreads, why didn't Goodreads do something to protect
their vaunted rating system from being trolled so easily?

Here are the rest of the messages in this thread for the reader's
edification:

Twenty four messages an no one brought up anything about the
fatally flawed Goodreads rating system that allows this to happen so
easily. Truly amazing. Especially considering nothing has changed
and it could all happen again today.

Note: On 26 January 2015,
not only did a similar carpet bombing happen, it escalated as noted
in the next section. Damn, I'm prescient.

Considering the ease with which a rating carpet bomb attack can
occur on Goodreads, it was inevitable that it would escalate into
all out war. On or about 16 January 2015 a 1* attack started on
obscure author, Raani York, who had one
book on Goodreads. This is reminiscent of the 2013 Trolling
incident and illustrates that Goodreads has done noting to fix their
flawed "review" system.

On 23 January 2015, it went nuclear in a most unexpected way. It
was 5* carpet bombed:

The 5* carpet bombing continues for 8 more pages.

Meanwhile, on the same day, many of the 5* carpet bombers start a
1* attack on Starlight
Seduction by Linda Hilton:

If you search through the mosh pit of both authors you will note
that some people who 1* bombed Raani York 5* bombed Linda Hilton and
vice-versa.

Unfortunately, it turns out there was further collateral damage.
Author Kevin Weinberg publicly supported Raani York on his
author page on Goodreads:

On 23 January 2015 Mr. Weinberg became a "fan" of Raani York. On 25
January 2015, he posted a comment on Sadie Forsythe's rambling
review as you can see above. As usual, when an author
confronts a reader in a review, the situation deteriorates. The end
result of this exchange was author Weinberg terminating his
membership in Goodreads and the usual suspects showed up to 1* his
books. Oddly reminiscent of what the usual suspects did to another
author who 5* rated Authors vs. Goodreads.

Goodreads claims there are 1
billion+ books in their database. Of course, that figure along
with the 40 million member figure is unaudited, so it may be highly
inflated. It turns out though, that there are an unknown quantity of
"ghost" books in the database. Some of the ghost books are pre-sale
books. If they are by reputable authors, they might eventually
become real books, but then again, maybe not. You should know that
any member can "review" or rate these books before they are
released. There are some famous troll attacks on pre-sale books.
Other ghost books are by wannabe authors posing as "Goodreads
Authors." What's hilarious is that when these ghost books get into
the Goodreads database, they cannot be removed, even if the author
put it into the database to test the waters for the title and after
negative reviews decided to rewrite the book with a new title and
wants the old book removed. Too bad, reality bites.

Here is a ghost book that was intended to be a ghost book. It was
written in a few hours, published on Smashwords on 06 February 2015
and Goodreads scooped it up into their database within two days,
whereupon it was unpublished without anyone buying it. However it
will be on Goodreads forever and since there is no requirement for
reading a book it can be reviewed and rated just like a real book.
So far, it has more than 40 ratings, most of them 5*.

Note:
For the first time I'm aware of, this book was eventually removed
from Goodreads along with all of the reviews, sometime in March,
2015. A month later, I.N. Ane was removed from Smashwords. However,
author Ane is still available at Amazon. Decoding
Goodreads is still listed. Go figure. Diddling Goodreads is
the only published book I know of with an ISBN that is not in the
Goodreads database. Apparently you can diddle Goodreads after all.

I first learned about ghost books on
Goodreads when I was researching the books of authors who
participated in carpet bombing other authors. Considering that
Goodreads does not vet members at all, there is no requirement to
read a book to review or rate it and Goodreads doesn't even bother
to enforce their lax review rules, I thought it odd that an author
would chance retaliation for participating in a trolling attack.
When checking out one of the more notorious trollers, I noticed she
claimed to be a "Goodreads Author" and claims to have written five
books. If you look at her author's page it appears she has published
five books; there are beautiful covers at least. However, if you
examine the books, not one of the five is actually published:

Scandal
appears to be a moderately popular story, published in August,
2014, except it isn't available anywhere. It was available on
the author's website for a time but was never actually
published. There are 90 ratings including 30 or so written
reviews. And there are pages of members who have added it to
their shelves, perhaps to read it, perhaps not. Three of the
stories are to be published sometime in 2015 although one of
them is a 400 page novel that already has a rating dated back in
June, 2014. That's one of the peculiarities of the Goodreads
rating system, you can rate and even review a book before it is
published. The final story, The Kings of Kearny only says it is
expected in 2016. In reality they are all ghost books.

The most ironic of all ghost books are a pair of books I
stumbled on when I was researching the founder of Goodreads,
Otis Chandler. I found an author page for Otis Chandler, but he
is a relative of the founder of Goodreads:

What is truly bizarre is that there are two books on this author
page entitled Unknown Book
and they have reviews and ratings. And Otis's Fan is none other
than Otis Chandler, founder of Goodreads, who lists himself as a
Goodreads employee. How humble of him.

Delving into the two books turns up a number of surprises. The
first one is that they aren't available anywhere and it isn't
clear that they ever were:

If you click on more details
there are no more details; the books have no ISBNs or ASINs so
there is no way to link them to a book outlet. The ratings /
reviews are enlightening:

Isn't that amazing, three 5*
ratings, one 4* rating and one 5* review. One rating was done
soon after Goodreads was created in 2007 by Beatrice-mal who
did 30 ratings on a single day, September 26, 2007, made
friends with three other members, who never read any books, on
September 27, 2007, and doesn't appear to have been active on
Goodreads since. All of a sudden, on December 28 and 29, three
more ratings appear. Suzi, on December 28 is rather
interesting. She did all 53 of her ratings on October 16,
December 5 or December 28, 2008 and every one of them is 5*.
Doesn't appear she has been back since November 29, 2010 when
she made her first, and only, friend, but read no more books.
Jeremiah looks to be a fairly normal Goodreads member, but
apparently became inactive in 2013. Christy has a private
profile so little can be surmised. The only written review was
done about a year later, when Rachel rated it 5* and left a
glowing, albeit terse review, on September 7, 2009. It should
be noted that all of Rachel's rating activity on Goodreads is
between September 5 and September 27, 2009 and then in
October, 2009, she begins reading a book, adds a book and then
her account goes quiet.

It cannot be discerned when the two Unknown Books were written
or when they were loaded on Goodreads. It appears that the
second book Unknown Book
9831295 was added later because the four 5* ratings
were all done in 2011 and none of the four reviewers appears
to be active.

Note: Sometime in 2015
Unknown Book 1959097
was removed from Goodreads.

While doing research into Ghost
Books on Goodreads, I stumbled across the Ghost
Members of Goodreads. These are even more bizarre than
Ghost Books and there are lots of them, perhaps tens of thousands of
them. My curiosity was piqued when I noticed the number of ratings
made all on the same day by members who rated ghost books. Most of
them were members of short duration, a long time ago and have never
been back. Therein lies the rub. There are no membership
requirements other than an email address. There is no membership
vetting whatsoever. If you have many email addresses, you can have
multiple memberships. Some people do, which is one of the reasons
there are so many Sock Puppets on Goodreads. If you don't
ask Goodreads to delete your membership, it never goes away;
Goodreads has no method to purge inactive members. Why would they?
It looks mighty impressive when they claim 40 million members.
Nobody ever audits any of their claims. Of course, if I were an
advertiser, I would like to know the accuracy of their membership
claims, i.e. how many there really are, how active they are?

My epiphany came when I was doing
research on one particularly negative member: L.

When you sign up and create your membership, you choose a handle
that will be linked to your member profile. Your email address,
which must be unique in the Goodreads database is not your handle.
In fact, you can make that completely invisible, for obvious
reasons. But your public handle is not unique. Hundreds,
thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of other members can have
the same handle you do. Makes for a lot of confusion.

I discovered L on another website, and while doing research about
member L on Goodreads, I discovered the ghost memberships. It is not
intuitively obvious how you find member information. Once you have
logged in, enter the term you want to search for in the window with
the search (magnifying glass) icon. Do your initial search. When the
search results are returned, there will be a series of buttons that
will narrow the search. Press the People button and it will
be underlined. Now you can search for members by handle. Here are
the results for searching for L:

Notice that the response reports that there were
about 200 members with the identifying handle L.
Notice also that of the 8 members summarized above from my screen
cut and paste, in just this one listing, two of them are from Iran.
As you scan through the listing on your screen, note how many
members have read 0 books and how many members are from Iran.

Click on one of the member icons and you will see a result like
this:

Notice that the member joined in August 2007, at the time Goodreads
was founded and that the user has never read a book. As you peruse
members, you will find lots of them that joined in 2007 and have
never read a book, never friended anyone and never joined a
group. This is an important point as we shall see later.

Before we delve further into the quagmire that is Goodreads
membership, let me draw your attention to the reported about 200
results heading which indicates you are probably only seeing
the tip of the iceberg. There could be 2000 or 200,000+ members with
the handle L. Also note that it is implied there are 10 pages of L
members you could examine. If you attempt to scroll to the next
page, you always get the same page of member data even though the
header indicates you are on another page. Considering how many other
features are broken in Goodreads software,
this doesn't come as a total surprise.

After considering the ramifications of the large number of members
with the single letter L handle, I wondered if there were lots of
other single letter handle members that hadn't ever read a book and
were from foreign countries, particularly Iran. There
are! I looked at members of the letter A:

The first members on this list borders on the absurd. Notice how
many of them are from Iran. And where is Los Angeles, Iran and Palo
Alto, Iran? Again we get about 200 results, and again, there
are 10 pages of them but you can't access any other page. Put any
single letter of the alphabet in the search field. You always get
the same type of results.

So then, I put aa in the search field, exactly the same type of
result. Hundreds of members, pretty much 0 books read. I put zz in
the search, then aaa. Always the same type of result. I put 1 in the
search field, same type of result. There is no way to tell how many
bogus members there are, but the math gets large, fast. One thing
that leaps out at you if you click on a member randomly is that most
of them were registered in 2007 - 2009 when Goodreads was brand new
and trying to look like it was growing rapidly. I think we know now
how it grew so rapidly now. Keep in mind that none of these people
will show up to the casual user of Goodreads because they never read
a book, never rated a book or wrote a review and never joined any
groups, so they are invisible. They just sit in the database,
inflating the member number statistics because there is never any
audit of any claims made by Goodreads.

By the way, I wonder why there are so many Iranian members of
Goodreads who never read any books? Does that seem strange to anyone
else considering our political relationship with Iran?

All of the information on this website
is available in a free booklet by my alter ego, Zoe Desh.

All of the information posted here can be found in the free
booklet, but real time updates will be posted on the website before
they make it into the next version of the book. There is a version
number at the bottom of this website and there will be a similar
version number on the copyright page of the booklet. If they are out
of sync, the latest information will be here on the website.